Introducing the Counting Argument against reductive materialism

Versions of the counting argument:
1. "Building Thoughts from Dust," Synthese, joshualrasmuss...
2. "Against Non-Reductive Physicalism," www.researchga...
More resources: joshualrasmuss...

[@maximusatlas9377]

Never thought that the Philosophy of the mind could go so deep like architecture. Good stuff.

[@kito-]

I love this argument! It's nice to have an argument against physicalism which doesn't hinge on intuitions about conceivability or possibility (which the physicalist can always remain skeptical about). Keep up the awesome work Josh!:)

[@TheBrunarr]

I didn't know Searle thought reductionism is a form of eliminativism. That's funny, because I actually had that same thought, so it's good to know people like Searle have thought about it too.

[@reverendgordontubbs]

Is the following statement a correct understanding of the key to this argument? The number of thoughts about material things in reality outnumber the material things in reality, therefore thoughts can't be reduced to material things.

[@ibrahimdagher2315]

Hey, Dr. Rasmussen! I absolutely love your content. I just have a single concern about this argument. So it goes 1. There is a thought for every class of towers. 2. There are more classes of towers than towers. 3. Therefore there are more thoughts than towers themselves. And so, the argument goes on to say that there are more thoughts than possible brain states. But here is my concern. What if one stipulated that, when 2 brain states interact, say brain state A and brain state B, they produce a third thought, a thought different than a thought about state A or a thought about state B, but rather a thought about the *class* of state A and state B. So, to fit that back into the lego metaphor, one could interject the premise: there is a tower for every class of towers. In this way, now we are back at the same number of thoughts for towers, or, the same number of brain states for thoughts. Does this make the argument invalid? Thanks so much! :)

[@WorldviewDesignChannel]

Great question! I would say that combinations ("towers") of brain states are themselves still brain states. So suppose there are more *complex combinations* of brain states than individual brain states. Still there are even MORE *sets* of complex combinations of brain states (by Cantor's theorem). If each of these sets can be the object of a logically possible thought, then there are still more logically possible thoughts than logically possible combinations of brain states. Hope that helps!

[@tbucker2247]

Non-mathematician/philosopher/logician here, but this reasoning would seem to imply the possibility of infinite thoughts given a total lack of a brain: 1) No brain, no concepts (set A). Size of set A is 0. 2) Set of classes of set A is set B. Size of B is 1, equivalent to thinking about thinking about nothing. 3) Why stop there? Set of classes of set B is set C, which has a size of 2. We're now creating classes of classes, or sets of sets. Seems reasonable. 4) This iterative process can continue to produce a set of arbitrary size, despite starting with the premise that there was no brain to think these thoughts.

[@tharfagreinir]

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is form."

[@logicalliberty132]

Excellent video! I have one question/potential criticism that is a little hard for me to clearly and precisely communicate, but I shall try my best! The thrust of the criticism boils down to this: What reason do we have for thinking our thoughts can be sufficiently "fine-grained", as it were, so as to facilitate the accurate correspondence of a unique thought for each material configuration, no matter how increasingly complex the material configuration becomes? The idea is that, at a certain point, it seems that material configurations become so complex and intertwined (say, containing hundreds of billions or trillions of parts) so as to go beyond our full and accurate grasp of them in thought -- our thought would be too coarse-grained, as it were, for accurately and fully representing or capturing the material configuration. This problem is best seen when we compare two such configurations. Suppose we take one material configuration with 900 trillion parts arranged and combined together in an extremely complex, intricate manner. Suppose we take this 900 trillion part configuration and tweak one part of it ever-so-slightly -- suppose we take one part from the interior of the arrangement -- so as to shift this individual material part 0.00000000001 picometers to the right. Then, these two material configurations are different, but it is hard to see I could have a thought of one that is not thereby a thought of the other precisely because they are so fine-grained that my mental representations of them would be sufficiently fine-grained to truly, accurately, and fully capture them and their difference. We know our minds are quite limited in a number of ways, including our powers of both imagination and conception -- and I fear that our mental representations (be it imaginative or conceptual) are too coarse-grained for having a unique thought correspond to each unique material configuration.

[@logicalliberty132]

I mean, perhaps this argument is self-defeating, since in order to even give an example of a complex and fine-grained material configurations that differs ever-so-slightly from a different one, I thereby have conceded the point that we can distinguish in thought between material configurations even when they are fine-grained. But perhaps the question still has force even if I am unable to illustrate it via examples. It seems the question may remain: What reason do we have for thinking that our mental representations are sufficiently fine-grained to accurately and fully capture exceedingly complex and fine-grained material arrangements and delineate between them (not only delineate between them, but even have an accurate representation even of a single one given the limits of our mind)?

[@WorldviewDesign]

Great question! I think it helps to think of the argument in terms of logically consistent types, rather than in terms of thoughts you or I could actually have. If a specific geometric configuration is logically consistent, then so is an equally specific phenomenal map/representation of that configuration. Logical consistency is all that is needed to get the result that there are more logically consistent types of thoughts than logically consistent types of material configurations... And that's enough to show a distinction between the two classes.

[@jmike2039]

This argument begs the question against semantically complex propositions that aren't realizable. I don't know how that's been ruled out.

[@tieferforschen]

I am a dualist, but I might have found an objection: 1. We cannot think the thoughts, that we cannot think. 2. Given our finite life time, we cannot test, whether we can have infinitely many thoughts. 3. We cannot know, whether we could potentially have inifitely many different thoughts. This way out would imply that we can have so many thoughts, that we do not realize, that we are lacking thoughts, that we cannot have. And since we cannot think thoughts, that we cannot have and cannot empiricaly test, how many thoughts we can have, the amount of possible thoughts might actually be limited. Maybe there are "Thought-Towers" we simply cannot hold, maybe there are concept combinations that are impossible for our mind, but we do not know about these, so that we lack awareness about these.

[@porteal8986]

The set of all logically possible toughts doesn't need to be instantiated in any physical state; the only thoughts that need to be accounted for are the thoughts that actually exist as physical states. The rest are only hypothetical, and the reductive physicalist would just say they don't actually exist. The thought of them might exist the same way you might personally think of the set of all natural numbers, but just like your mind doesn't need to actually contain the entire set of all natural numbers at any given time in order to have a thought of it, the entire set of all logically possible thoughts doesn't need to be physically instantiated in order to have a thought of it.

[@greanbeen2816]

Soundtrack goes hard

[@philosophyofreligion]

The reductive materialist would deny premise 1 since he thinks that thoughts are just material. So, it’s true that there are more classes of towers than towers but false that those classes have nonmaterial thoughts associated with each of them. What’s your response?

[@WorldviewDesign]

Correct.

[@WorldviewDesign]

However, by analogy, suppose someone claims that a picture is a pixel. They make their case. There are more pictures than pixels because for any arrangement of pixels on a screen, there is a corresponding picture (maybe an ugly one). There are not more pixels than pixels. Therefore, not every picture is a pixel. Yet, then Bob objects. Bob thinks every picture is nothing but a pixel. He's a reductive pixelist. So Bob denies that there is a corresponding picture for every arrangement of pixels. Is Bob's reply good? I don't think so. Bob fails to take into account the *independent obviousness* of the premise that arrangements of pixels can comprise a logically possible picture. In the same way, a reductive physicalist who simply digs in and rejects premise 1 isn't taking into account the independent obviousness of the premise that classes of arrangements of matter can be a content of a logically possible thought. This obviousness doesn't presuppose that reductive materialism is false. Rather it's a first step in a longer argument that *entails* that reductive materialism is false.

[@onseayu]

@@WorldviewDesign nice. i really like your responses. could i ask you then, for a rebuttal to this argument then? even if you believe it, just to play devil's advocate. because i've tried, but it seems fairly solid to me.

[@jamesscalt0172]

so we have the space of brain configurations, and the space of logically possible thoughts is bigger than the space of brain configurations, however it could easily be that only a subset of the space of logically possible thoughts are available to us e.g. some thoughts might be too long and complex to ever be held in mind by us because we run out of memory and start corrupting it. for example if someone told you to consider the thought "T1 is my favourite tower or T2 is my favourite tower all the way up to T(trillion) " you wouldn't be able to think that thought all in one go. so yes the space of logically possible thoughts is much larger than the set of thoughts that our brain states are able to bring about, and that's what we'd expect given our brains are material and came about through evolutionary processes.

[@jamesscalt0172]

but I suppose someone could object that this isn't getting to the core of the argument. Dr. Rasmussen's argument can be applied only to the thoughts and brainstates are brains are capable. of. i.e. consider all the brainstates our brain can have , then you can generate new thoughts from those brainstates by linking togethr the corresponding thoughts associated with those brainstates with "or" or "and", and then supposedly you must have a new thought. BUT our list of all brainstates must be closed under such "or" or "and" operations . e.g. the list of brainstates doesn't just contain the brainstate for "one" and the brainstate for "two" but must also contain the brainstate for "one and two" however if the set was truly closed under operations like "or" and "and" then it would mean that our brains are able to think of infinitely long strings. Obviously we can't do that. like hold every single digit of pi in base 10 in your head at once. So it seems like our limit for experiencing thoughts is just the amount of "ram" in our brain, which is the kind of limitation that evolution seems like a very reasonable response for.

[@poozletekitoi]

1/ From P you may infer P _LEGO_ Q 2/ From P _LEGO_ Q you may infer Q C/ Therefore from P you may infer Q

[@barry.anderberg]

Hi Josh, I'm reading through Who Are You, Really. I'm really enjoying it. A thought I had while reading your explanations of the different forms of your counting argument was that I can deny that logical operators like AND or OR linking two thoughts makes a new thought. It doesn't seem evident to me using introspection that I can have the thought "The sky is blue and the grass is green". It seems plausible that it might *seem* like I can, but I'm actually having three sequential thoughts. "The sky is blue", "and", "the grass is green". This is because thinking still happens in a temporal medium. One thought follows another thought, albeit very rapidly. What do you think?

[@thoughtfulpilgrim1521]

Very cool!

[@ApologeticsSquared]

Hmm... Well, while I agree with the conclusion, I think that the Counting Argument has a flaw. Let L(w) be the cardinality of the set of all Lego towers in world w, and let T(w) be the cardinality of the set of all possible thoughts about the classes of Lego towers in world w. Your argument shows that for every w, L(w) < T(w). However, that doesn't show that the cardinality of 'the set of all possible Lego towers across all worlds' is larger than the 'set of all possible thoughts about classes of Lego towers across all worlds.' Have a nice day! :)

[@jimmyfaulkner1855]

What are your thoughts on Keith Frankish’s Illusionism? It’s been a more developed and sophisticated version of eliminative materialism

[@perarve2463]

The conclusion towards the end only holds if it is possible for an individual to have any possible thought. Most of us are intellectually limited, probably also the speaker. That is we have limitations that may be explained by the physical limitations of our brain. Note, that the argument in this video imply that the total number of thoughts is larger then the number of thoughts that are expressible in writing or orally. At the very end there is a plea to naive. Our direct naive impressions should be taken more seriously than what we might come tu understand after critical thinking. There was an example of water in the end, that water is exactly what it seems to be. This was an utterly naive statement that any knowledgable person easily can refute.

[@stuckmannen3876]

interesting :)

[@johnsonav1]

In the accompanying paper, "Building Thoughts From Dust," your argument contains the premise, "There are more classes of physical properties than there are physical properties." But how many physical properties are there, such that there could be more classes than that? Consider the physical properties of the form "being composed of N physical parts," for every cardinal number N. For your premise to be true, there must be more classes of physical properties than physical properties of this form. But there is no number of classes of physical properties such that there aren't at least as many physical properties of this form. So the premise in question must be false. Do you have any thoughts?

[@CourtneyRichards3000]

A comment (without reading your papers.) You haven't shown that thoughts and brain states are analogous to real and natural numbers as described in Cantor's theorem, without that your second premise isn't valid.

[@matiasvonbell]

It seems to me that the argument doesn't rely on thoughts or concepts being analogous to a number system, simply that there is some (perhaps uncountable) number of concepts and and some number of possible thoughts. Cantor's theorem works for any cardinality, not just to show that the cardinality of reals is greater than that of the natural numbers. So even with an uncountable set of concepts, there is a larger uncountable set of logically possible thoughts.

[@jmike2039]

Haven't finished the video yet but this just seems like the infinitude problem which has a very simple solution; it could just be the case that because there is a finite arrangement of matter in the brain, or neural activity, it doesn't follow that there are an infinite number of realizable propositions. There could just be semantically complex propositions that can't be precieved by the mind. I don't see how that's ruled out.

[@m.l.pianist2370]

This might be a dumb question, but why can't one physical structure (Lego tower) ground two or more different thoughts? I have the intuition that this is possible, but I might be confused.

[@MyContext]

We use concepts to talk about what we find in reality, but the moment we divorce concepts from reality we are making a departure from rationality. This video would seem to be an example of this issue in play. We cannot have meaningful concepts without understanding HOW whatever system works. We currently only know that the brain in operation is the mind, but we don't know how the brain works with respect to what we denote as the mind. We only know THAT the mind is a product of the brain based on the mountain of data showing such to be the case. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

[@WorldviewDesign]

Btw, this video doesn't address the position that the mind is a *product of* the brain. It only address the position that the mind is *reducible to* the brain. Also, when you say that *we* know the brain is the mind, that "we" doesn't include me and other experts in this field. In fact, if the counting argument is sound, then *no one* knows the mind is the brain, because the mind isn't the brain. But even if the counting argument is not sound, no one who works in this field think there is a mountain of data showing that the mind is the brain. No one. Everyone recognizes that there are different ways to interpret the data -- e.g., dual aspect theory.

[@Ryba125]

Wrong, because we have a physical brain, so our thoughs are limited, and a simple turning machine can produce a infinitely varied output from a finite set of instructions, does the turning machine has a soul too ?

[@sharmcity3345]

I want to get it, but I don’t :-(

[@matswessling6600]

eh.. this assumes infinite number of legos/thoughts. you dont know that.

[@samuelpark8074]

i feel so dumb. what would be a synonym for "class"?

[@samuelpark8074]

oh, i see it must be pluralities

[@kito-]

Pluralities is good, or "group", maybe "set" but that does have a technical usage